Linux boot drives have been around for a long time. Geeks keep a USB stick loaded with their own operating system in their pocket all the time. And when they show up at a computer lab, all it takes is a quick plugging to load their own operating system on top of whatever is there. With smartphone and laptop ubiquity, I wouldn’t be surprised if this trend were on the way out–but there was always something neat about the idea of an OS in your pocket.

Here’s how it used to work. First there were codecs. A codec – or “coder-decoder” is a piece of software to convert videos to different formats, and then convert them back again for you to watch. There are huge numbers of them – far more than you’d ever figure there was a real use for. Traditionally, whichever piece of software you were using to the view the video seemed to support every codec in existence except the one you needed. If you were very lucky, an hour or so hunting around obscure websites would allow you to track down and install the right one.

Desktop

Dell’s Sputnik developer laptop, which has recently received a bump to its specifications, is now available for purchase from Dell’s UK web site and the company has also launched the product on its German language sites. The product can be found in a new “Developer/Linux” category in the Laptops & Ultrabooks entry in Dell’s Small and Medium Business (SMB) online store.

Kernel Space

Leading global provider of integrated end-to-end mobile communication software and solutions Borqs International Holding Corp. (Borqs) today announced that it has joined the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux. Borqs has four offices in the APAC region, located in Beijing, Bangalore, Wuhan and Shenzhen. In the future, Borqs will participate in the Code Aurora Forum and other Linux Foundation activities, including the Linux End User Summit. Linux and collaborative development have both become pervasive in the mobile and enterprise computing markets. More than 1.3 million Linux-based Android devices are activated every day. Based on this trend, Borqs will increase its investment in Linux, bringing more innovative solutions to partners and end users. In addition to Borqs, the firms Denx, Gazzang, Genymobile, Mandriva and Seneca College have also joined the Linux Foundation.

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

Shared earlier today were OpenGL game benchmarks under different Linux desktops. Now to complement those earlier results are 2D performance tests under Unity, KDE, GNOME Shell, Xfce, LXDE, and Razor-qt.

From the same Intel HD 4000 “Ivy Bridge” system after completing the OpenGL tests this morning, some 2D performance tests were carried out. Past testing has revealed the 2D performance also fluctuates a great deal depending upon the desktop environment / window manager.

Indie Royale, organizers of the pay-what-you-want DRM-free bundle, have launched their latest collection of indie titles called the The Mash Bundle (thanks to Blue’s News). This new bundle offers Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, Guns of Icarus Online, Kung Fu Strike: The Warrior’s Rise, KRUNCH, and Delve Deeper.

A lot of things happen at the start of each month, and one of those that I look most forward to is being able to check out the updated hardware survey at Steam. It’s especially interesting right now, because Windows 8 is only four months old, and the platform became official for Linux only a couple of weeks ago. Given it happened so recently, I think most might agree that the Linux aspect is a bit more interesting than the Windows 8 aspect at the moment.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

I was a loyal and happy KDE 3.x user way back when only dinosaurs used Linux. Then KDE4 came along and my happy KDE world was upended. The first KDE4 release was back in 2008– how time flies!– and like so many KDE3 users I had my complaints: Too lardy! Too weird! Where is my stuff?

Well, that was then, and here we are five years later. So what does KDE4 look like these days? Is it still lardy and full of weird stuff? I installed Kubuntu 12.10 just to get KDE 4.10 so I could poke at it and see what it’s doing.

It’s that time again, release time! In this period it seems very easy to round some edges and push up things.
And this because of the great contribution people is giving us via patches, comments (also on this blog), bug reports… I cannot remember a release where I coded myself so little and checked patches and suggestions so much
The result is this rekonq 2.2 release!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Florian Mullner submitted a patch that keeps Overview open when a Control key is held. This 19-only lines patch will be one of the greatest new features in GNOME Shell 3.8, together with the pressure sensitivity Message Tray.

Gnome 3.4 introduced a new application called Gnome Boxes. The 3.6 release brings many changes for Gnome Boxes, and now here is a hasty preview. The various bug fixes and stability improvements make the 3.6 release far more refined, so try it today.

Rolling releases are not new. Gentoo was one of the first, if not the actual, that was considered a rolling release. Later rPath, then PCLOS came along and Sabayon followed. Arch joined the fray and openSUSE began Tumbleweed. But more projects are kicking around the idea these days and some have even done it.

Rolling release are those systems which are updated in smaller increments over time usually from within the system with a software management client as opposed to the more traditional installation of a new system every so often. The advantages to the user is obvious, but the developer has his reasons as well. That’s why more and more projects are implementing the rolling release model, or are at least talking about it. Here are two very recent examples.

In case it wasn’t evident from the name, LXpup is a custom distribution spin made from Puppy Linux with the LXDE user interface. I should say by default, because the developer also distributes modules of several other popular desktop environments, but more about that later. Just remember that the user can substantially change the look and functionality of the desktop, so even if LXDE is not your thing this spin might still be for you.

New Releases

Red Hat Family

Barclays Capital analyst Raimo Lenschow this morning picked up coverage of the open source software company Red Hat with an Overweight rating and a $60 price target. The stock closed Wednesday at $50.55.

“Open source continues to proliferate within enterprise IT, disrupting the traditional software license model,” the analyst writes in a research note. “Red Hat is the clear enterprise open source leader: While open source already has a strong foothold in enterprise IT, we expect it to play an increasingly large role as cloud and software defined infrastructure adoption gathers momentum. With its leadership in the open source community, Red Hat is positioned to benefit as this trend continues to play out.”

Fedora

Debian Family

The Debian Project is pleased to announce that, according to the terms of the new trademark policy, Debian logos and marks may now be used freely for both non-commercial and commercial purposes. The Debian Project encourages wide use of its marks in all ways that promote Debian and free software.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

A while back, Leann Ogasawara, Canonical Kernel Team Manager, has said that it has been discussed internally to use a rolling release model for Ubuntu between LTS releases, but that it is just an idea for now. With the new Ubuntu Touch, which needs both “velocity and agility”, the rolling release mode seems to be more than just an idea and Rick Spencer, Engineering Director at Canonical, has made a proposal about this on the Ubuntu Devel mailing list.

Within the Ubuntu realm there have been some dramatic changes that have erupted at the end of February 2013. The first shift was that the Ubuntu Developer Summit has shifted to an electronic-only format with the first one in the new style set to launch within a week of announcement. The second shift was the announcement that rolling releases are under formal consideration with that release paradigm change being under consideration at the hastily-announced event.

Let’s get one thing clear: The VP of Ubuntu Engineering at Canonical, Rick Spencer writes a mean proposal. Honestly. I deal with more than a fair amount of marketing copy-writing and I can tell you it’s a great pitch. It’s completely decided in its stance and it uses emotive and empowering power-words like converge, velocity and agility. You’ll find nothing but the finest propaganda here.

Enea® (NASDAQ OMX Nordic:ENEA), a world leading operating system solution vendor for 3G and 4G infrastructure equipment, today announced its Enea® Linux support for Xilinx Zynq™-7000 All Programmable SoC.

Enea® Linux is now available for the Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC family, providing a comprehensive cross-development tool chain and runtime environment that may be combined with Enea and other proprietary technologies, depending on the specific use cases and requirements.

The folks who built the Raspberry Pi knew they had a great idea, but they probably didn’t anticipate just how successful it would be. The Raspberry Pi Foundation today is celebrating the computer’s first birthday, a million devices sold, and countless DIY and programming projects completed.

Developers plan to use Linux in half of their upcoming embedded projects, according to preliminary data from an annual EE Times embedded market survey. And Android leads the Linux pack.

The data from EE Times’s “2013 Embedded Market Study” were disclosed to embedded market executives by UBM Tech vice president David Blaza and EE Times editor-in-chief Alex Wolfe at Embedded World in Nuremburg last week.

If you are among the many people waiting eagerly for a revelatory smartphone from Motorola, Google CFO and Vice President Patrick Prichette wants you to tone down those expectations. According to The Verge, Prichette has said that the products in Motorola’s pipeline are “not really to the standards that what Google would say is wow — innovative, transformative.”

Are you planning to buy a Sony Android phone this year? Well, you might want to wait for Sony C670X, a 4.8-inch handset in the works.

According to a report by Xperia Blog, Sony C670X should be similar to the Xperia Z (codenamed C660X). It is likely to pack a 1.8GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 (APQ8064T) processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, 13-megapixel camera and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean out of the box.

It is Mobile World Congress week, and we all know about the plethora of new Android devices announced. Phones and tablets are everywhere, mostly from familiar names. Then there’s also the new HP (yes, them) tablet, the budget-friendly HP Slate 7. With pricing that starts at $169.99, the big comparison will come from the Nexus 7.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

The government should not have an “open source first policy,” Homeland Security Department Chief Information Officer Richard Spires said Wednesday, but added officials should look to open source technology whenever possible.

SaaS/Big Data

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

LibreOffice is now build by one instance of make that is aware of the whole dependency tree. According to my master development build (that is: a build without localization, help, extensions) yesterday, this instance of make now knows about

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

So what a Free Software activism is expected to do? You can see it on their mailing list (in Romanian language): they are unhappy, threaten the TV channel, invite members to comment on the website, talk about a flashmob, boycott, even the “DDOS” word was heard (that mail is still up). Currently the flashmob is under planning, supposed to happen tomorrow morning (details in the linked thread). Focus was lost, it moved from the license to linguistics.

Project Releases

Samba 4 has been in development for a long time but an official first release is imminent, the developers say. Its biggest feature is Active Directory Server support, which removes the last hurdle in a pure-Linux server set-up, with only Windows PCs and Macs as clients. In this FOSS for Windows special issue of LFY, let’s explore how to set up Active Directory Server, so that you can finally phase out those pesky Windows Servers while keeping Windows desktops and Macs intact.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

Standards/Consortia

* governments are actually aware of the benefits of FLOSS (ending denial)
* governments now see the FUD about FLOSS costing more as hollow
* governments are beginning to prefer FLOSS by banning trademarks from purchasing requests
* governments are sharing more data and more knowledge about FLOSS with citizens and students
* a few governments are even moving to GNU/Linux on clients and servers

1. Microsoft Windows OS – A reasonable price to use a modern operating system on a personal computer is ~$20. With M$, you pay the retailer ~$100 for the privilege. The retailer takes a markup and the OEM (Original Equiment Manufacturer) gets about half what’s left and M$ gets the rest, so two organizations are being paid about twice the going rate for an OS. You can have Debian GNU/Linux, for instance for about 30 minutes’ work.

2. Apple’s hardware – The same people make your PC whether it’s from Apple or Acer or HP or Dell, the Chinese.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

In the first jury trial stemming from an Occupy Wall Street protest, Michael Premo was found innocent of all charges yesterday after his lawyers presented video evidence directly contradicting the version of events offered by police and prosecutors.

Cablegate

The separate, but deeply entwined, stories of US Army private Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange have taken another step towards resolution.
Having taken responsibility for his leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret military and diplomatic reports to WikiLeaks, Manning now faces the prospect of a long prison sentence.

According to some reports, Manning’s call went to the public editor’s voice mail at the Times, which could explain why no one in the newsroom contacted him — as anyone who has ever worked in a large newsroom knows, crank calls and vaguely conspiratorial reports from would-be tipsters come with the territory, and many don’t result in any action. The part of his story about speaking with someone at the Washington Post directly would seem a little more damning, but he apparently didn’t provide many details to the reporter he spoke to.

Pretrial hearing ends with a closed session. The government wants to call a witness that the defense says is both irrelevant and prejudicial. But the government doesn’t believe the defense should be allowed to interview him before he testifies.

Finance

On Capitol Hill, there’s still no deal in sight to avert the 85-billion-dollars’ worth of cuts which will kick in later on Friday. It’s known in Washington as the ‘sequester’ and would see significant reductions on military and domestic spending. But Republicans and Democrats just can’t agree on what to do. President Obama says U.S. will get through the deep budget cuts if it has to, but admits the economy will get even worse. Economist Richard Wolff says the American people should prepare for the worst.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

As part of an effort to capture one of Africa’s most wanted men, an unique partnership has taken shape in central Africa where battle-tested U.S. special operations forces have been working alongside a team of young activists from California to eliminate the notorious rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army.

“We were able to come together with them and strategize,” said Sean Poole, counter-LRA programs manager for Invisible Children, a San Diego-based non-profit group. “It all started with military chartered aircraft dropping leaflets.”

In 2009, we learned from Wikileaks cable that Beyonce got $1 million to perform at Gaddafi’s family party. So did Usher and Mariah Carey. Mariah Carey received $1 million dollars to sing four songs at Gaddafi’s son’s birthday party at Nikki Beach, St Bart’s. When the story broke, Beyonce was so embarrassed that she donated the money to earthquake relief agencies in Haiti. Usher also donated his to charities, including Amnesty International. In his statement to the press, Usher said that he was “sincerely troubled.”

When Maria Carey donated hers to charity she made this statement: “I was naïve and unaware of who I was booked to perform for. I feel horrible and embarrassed to have participated in this mess. Going forward, this is a lesson for all artists to learn from. We need to be more aware and take more responsibility regardless of who books our shows. Ultimately we as artists are to be held accountable.”

This week we take a look at how the Washington Post challenges some sequester spin. And CBS pokes fun at Iranian claims about Argo–but are the Iranians right that Argo is fiction? Plus George Will has some thoughts about stop-and-frisk policing.

Privacy

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court ruled that Americans didn’t have standing to challenge secret surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency. Now, new details about the eavesdropping have surfaced—which will likely fuel fresh concerns about the scale and accountability of the agency’s spy programs.

A book published earlier this month, “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry,” contains revelations about the NSA’s snooping efforts, based on information gleaned from NSA sources. According to a detailed summary by Shane Harris at the Washingtonian yesterday, the book discloses that a codename for a controversial NSA surveillance program is “Ragtime”—and that as many as 50 companies have apparently participated, by providing data as part of a domestic collection initiative.

Intellectual Monopolies

he Canadian government today introduced a bill aimed at ensuring the Canada complies with the widely discredited Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Despite the European Union’s total rejection of ACTA along with assurances that ACTA provisions would not resurface in the Canada – EU Trade Agreement, the new bill is designed to ensure that Canada is positioned to ratify ACTA by addressing border measures provisions. The core elements of the bill include the increased criminalization of copyright and trademark law as well as the introduction of new powers for Canadian border guards to detain shipments and work actively with rights holders to seize and destroy goods without court oversight or involvement. While the bill could have been worse – it includes an exception for individual travelers (so no iPod searching border guards), it does not include patents, and excludes in-transit shipments – the bill disturbingly suggests that Canada is gearing up to ratify ACTA since this bill addresses many of the remaining non-ACTA compliant aspects of Canadian law. Moreover, it becomes the latest example of caving to U.S. pressure on intellectual property, as the U.S. has pushed for these reforms for years, as evidenced by a 2007 Wikileaks cable in which the RCMP’s National Coordinator for Intellectual Property Crime leaked information on a bill to empower Canadian border guards (the ACTA negotiations were formally announced several months earlier). [Update: On the same day the Canadian government introduced Bill C-56, the U.S. Government issued its Trade Policy Agenda and Annual Report, which calls on Canada to "meet its Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) obligations by providing its customs officials with ex officio authority to stop the transit of counterfeit and pirated products through its territory"]

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again